Space utopianism from deep in the heart of the What Were We Thinking? Decade

[mmcirvin]

If you were a nerdy kid who lived through the Seventies (or early Eighties), james_nicoll's ongoing review and discussion of a 1977 CoEvolution Quarterly compliation on space colonies will ring several bells. If you want to know what it was like, this may be a good place to start. It just gets better and crackier as it goes on, and James' comments are typically deadpan.

As people such as Stewart Brand and Gerard O'Neill and R. Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri trade comments with the likes of Wendell Berry and Lewis Mumford, often the anti-space-colonization side is as crazy as the pro side. But the argument between T. A. Heppenheimer and John Holt gets to the meat of it (Holt gets his orbital mechanics wrong, but otherwise I think his objections to O'Neill's cylinder colonies are pretty devastating).

Yes, there were people back then who seriously thought that multi-thousand-person space cities could be built at the Earth-Moon L5 point by the 1990s. Sometimes, I was one of them. Sometimes, NASA's PR people encouraged them. Sometimes, people still insist that it really could have happened if only [insert politically charged counterfactual here] just to annoy kadath. In its way it was more outrageous than any tailfinned Wernher von Braun vision of the Collier's era.

For all I know, people might emigrate massively into space someday. The future's hard to predict. But at the very least, the claim that this can be practically done with existing technology doesn't make a lot of sense, and people were already claiming that over 30 years ago.

Comments

In the future we don't need roads.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

I have a sort of nostalgia for this stuff. I think I started high school in 1989 or 90, but I devoured any of the science books in my library, Cosmos, and Robots which I can't find a link to, but it lots of 80's robots in it, (Ben Skora's AROK and the ODEX-1, which I saw on an episode of Ripley's and that looked like an articulated virus) and taught me what degrees of freedom were. There were, even, pre Moon landing books that predicted what landing on the moon would be like, with had some wonderful art in them, and I sort of wish now that I'd stolen some. I remember the articulated space suit they were going to wear on Mars, and space stations covered with lunar gravel and spaceplanes that looked like the Concorde with a Dustbuster on the bottom. And I remember when the space station was going to be about as big as the Death Star, and plastered with American flags and Coca-Cola logos, and an articulated (probably Canadian) robot hand with a middle finger we could point at Gorbachev right before Reagan's space lasers melted the Kremlin. It was going to be awesome, and it was all going to happen soon. Like a good nerd Millerite, I half believed the hype.

I always thought the O'Neill cylinders and the toruses (torii?) and things were going to be eventualities, and maybe I'd see a small spinning station in my lifetime. I remember when it was presented as a possibility for the eventual ISS. Of course I had no concept of the actual engineering problems involved and the Shuttle seemed a lot safer then than it does now, and it looked a lot more like The Brilliant Future than The Dead Past. My cynical adult self, even in my persona as a writer, is hard pressed to come up with a plausible scenario for space engineering on the scale of those massive stations. Smaller stations like the ISS or even MIR or Skylab, are probably smarter. Something modular that goes up, does what it does, comes down, maybe gets dredged up out of the ocean and repurposed. Staged rockets and small LEO craft like SpaceShipOne are probably better than the big Shuttle. Sojourner was almost like having someone standing there sifting through the ochre dust, at least, so it seemed on television. Space hotels are only ever going to be built by billionaires just because they want to see a space hotel, and bounced around in by other billionaires for whom the momentary parabola of the Vomit Comet is still not enough.

Even though I'm living, now, with burgeoning nanotech and genetic engineering and the Web and ubiquitous cellphone surveillance and, yeah, a lot of innovations and powers and looming fail-states which would have confounded and amazed the futurists of thirty years ago, I still miss the stupid and ill-conceived enthusiasm of future past. If I had a time machine I would dress in a silver jumpsuit and put on a pair of aviator goggles and a helmet with a gigantic fin on top and go back far enough in time that telling the mundanes I was from the world of tomorrow circa 2009 made my getup seem entirely plausible.

Oh, I did tour NASA last year, and I saw the vast size of the Saturn V engines (strangely and somehow smaller than you think, as they must be, being mythic in their scope) and inside the Shuttle mockup, and I remember looking at the cockpit and thinking to myself that is what a gorram spaceship looks like. I never saw those little trundling robots they had in Flight of the Navigator, though. The ones that looked like the shuttles from V.

The future is never quite what you think it is.

Re: In the future we don't need roads.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think the Singularity/Moore's Law Will Eat Your Brain stuff is the current version of this. Or at least the ten-years-ago version; I'm not sure how much hype it's getting now.

Part of the background of the Seventies stuff is that the Seventies were in some ways like today: many people thought Earthbound civilization was on the verge of total collapse for any of a dozen reasons, and some people were kind of hoping it would happen. You could sort of squint at the space colony stuff and think it was maybe a way out.

Of course that leads to the obvious moral objection raised by many commenters in the magazine: even assuming any of this works (and in hindsight many of the moral critics actually seem too optimistic about the feasibility of it and the likelihood of funding--you have to remember they'd just seen people walk on the Moon in recent memory), you're going to do this just so you can use your riches and technology to tell the ongoing disaster of Earth to go to hell?

Re: In the future we don't need roads.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Which, to his credit, was not O'Neill's pitch; he believed the colonies would save Earth by building solar power satellites ad infinitum. Which didn't really make much sense, given an even halfway critical analysis, but at least it was about Earth.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Total tangent, please forgive me.

In one of those posts, James talked about the idea of adding birth control to our water supply for mandated government population control. This reminded me of an old young adult sci-fi book I read back in the 80s, where the group of teens that were the focus of the book noticed they started pairing off into boyfriend-girlfriends. The culprit was something added to some specific food by the Big Mean Adults who were controlling the kids for whatever reason, and our heroes avoided that food so they didn't get distracted by all that icky icky romance.

Please, tell me you know what book I'm talking about. It's been driving me nuts for 2 weeks now.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Do you want me to post a Yet Another Story ID to rec.arts.sf.written?

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I've been avoiding Usenet, but you're right, I may have to do it. Depends on how crazy this makes me.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to do it for you, if you want to avoid contact with usenet.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't, but it sounds like a pretty typical YA science fiction plot, especially from that era.

It's a little bit like Ian Macleod's creepy short story "Grownups", but that was written much later and takes place in an alternate world in which people have three sexes.